Fiction secrets — write and leave out the boring stuff: four tips

There’s only one rule if you want readers: leave out anything that’s boring, especially if you’re trying to control your readers by force-feeding them information. Your aim as novelist is to ignite your readers’ imagination. You want your readers to feel something, as they read.

Here are some tips to help you to do that.

1. Everyone wants something, always

I’m not by nature a writer who plots for the joy of it. I plot because I need to know what every main character wants. Knowing what characters want doesn’t involve writing character bios. You don’t need an extensive bio: just figure out what each character wants.

Content ideas for your author’s blog

Once they’ve decided to try a blog, authors have another huge concern: what do I blog?

Nonfiction authors rarely ask this question, because they blog about their books’ topics. However, it’s a real concern for novelists. You’ve written your novels, but you feel that if you blog about your daily life, no one will read your blog.

There are endless blog topics you can consider, even if you’re a novelist. Let’s look at some of them.

Last year, I spoke with a writer who wanted to write fiction, but he felt that he didn’t have the time to write a novel. He was working long hours, and he and his wife had just welcomed a new baby. I suggested that he write short stories. When you don’t have much time to spare, writing short stories is much easier than writing a novel.

In a novel, you need to keep a lot of material in your head. The characters, the plot, character arcs, settings, and much more. With a short story, there’s much less to keep track of. Once you’ve got the basic situation, you can spend ten minutes on the story in your lunch hour, or you can write a complete story in a weekend.

If you get into the habit of writing short stories, you benefit in many ways.

Collaborations (if you’re writing part of a book, or are writing a book in collaboration with another author);

Final draft;

Front matter, back matter, etc;

Versions (editions, if you like.) One of the huge benefits of self-publishing is that you can update your book at any time. Scrivener makes it easy to create new editions;

Book series, and serials: if a book is part of a series, Scrivener lets you keep as many books as you like in the same Scrivener file — without messing up. This is hugely useful. If you’re working on book 3, you can keep sections of books 1 and 2 open as references;

1. What Do You FEEL?

Start paying attention to what you feel, as you read in your favorite genre. Romance is the hottest selling genre, but emotion counts in every genre. Think about the emotions the characters feel: do you feel them? Why? What did the writer do, which drew you into the story, so that your emotions were engaged?

You can’t arouse an emotion in your characters, and then in readers, unless you feel the emotion yourself. I can’t write hard-hitting crime fiction, because I don’t want to feel those emotions. Everyone’s different. Read several different genres, until you think to yourself: “I could write that!” If you think you can, you can.

Freelance writing: hello independence

Before we get into the tips, keep this in mind: you cannot fail.

Today, anyone (and I do mean anyone) can be a successful freelance writer. There are more markets for writers globally than there have ever been. Companies are making huge profits in the freelance marketplace: thousands of jobs for writers are posted on the job marketplaces every day, and these companies take their cuts from what writers earn.

Which brings us to (just to repeat): you cannot fail.

Decide that you’ll be a successful freelance writer making six figures annually, and you will be. Onward to the essential tips. 🙂

Writing ebooks for cash: can YOU write fiction?

Yes, you can. It’s challenging for nonfiction writers however. TV and movies don’t help. You can get some idea of novels’ structure from movies, but novels are more intense than movies. In a novel, readers live vicariously, as your characters.

Here’s what I tell my students: be there. Be in your novel, or in your short story. Fiction authors know what “show, don’t tell” means. To nonfiction authors, it’s a new world. Writers of nonfiction tend to narrate everything, which means that they’re writing outlines, not stories.

When you’re there, right in your fiction, you see, hear, touch, smell, taste, and think, as your character. You’re in someone else’s skin. When you’re there, your readers are too, and that’s what they want.

Want to write a book? Here’s how to plan it in 5 minutes

Follow steps one to five below. You should be able to complete the steps in five minutes or less.

Why five minutes? Because… five minutes.

No matter how busy you are, you can spare five minutes — and those five minutes will either confirm that your initial idea is great for you, or it’s a complete disaster and you need to pick something else.

1. Go LOCAL, for less competition and fewer hassles

We’ve talked about servicing local businesses before. It’s much easier to get local clients than clients on the other side of the world, all things being equal.

No matter where you live, whether it’s a major city, or a whether it’s a tiny town with five houses and a feed and grain store, it’s easier to get local clients. If you’re in a tiny town, choose the nearest largish city from which you’ll get clients.

Please do this exercise NOW, before reading on

Head over to Google.com, and type “writing services my town” into the search query box to see what comes up. Don’t enter the quotes, and for “my town” enter the name of your nearest large city.

1. You’ll write when you’re ready: be patient with yourself

I started writing around 15 years ago, very much the dilettante. Writing a book would be fun, I thought. When it stopped being fun, and turned out to be hard, I quit.

Of course, I started writing again a month, or a year or two later. I was happier writing than not-writing.

Whenever I stopped writing, I was very down on myself. That was a mistake. I stopped writing because I wasn’t ready. When I was finally ready, I knew it. All my previous bad experiences had become lessons — there were things I needed to learn, both about myself, and about writing.